Many lawyers who have a law blog probably have no idea they have a law blog.
I am serious.
Many of the law blogs I see, and I use the word “blog” liberally, are a page on a website filled with a lot of content.
The blogs are not titled anything more than “blog.” No Florida employment law blog, no Illinois Workers Compensation Law Blog, just “blog.”
How can a lawyer or a group of lawyers not know that their firm has a blog? Easy.
A lawyer buys a new website from a legal website company. The lawyer, having heard of something called a blog, jumps on the offer to pay a little more for one. Whatever it is or wherever it goes, who cares. “I’ve heard I should have one.”
In some cases, the lawyer buying a website has never heard of a law blog, but the offer to buy something they’re told will make their website rank higher on Google sounds reasonable.
And not to worry about the blog, as if the lawyer would, the legal website company says they’ll take care of everything with the blog thing.
In a firm with a number of lawyers, one partner will be in charge of buying the new website. When asked over a partner’s meeting if they have the website covered, the response will be “sure thing.” The other partners are glad that website thing is over with.
I’ve been such a firm and the yellow page (it was the ‘80’s & ‘90’s), television, radio, and magazine buys were handled just like that – one partner covered, with the others paying little, if any, attention.
Not much due diligence on anyone’s part – as if we had enough expertise and common sense to exercise due diligence on the subject anyway.
Reading a post from Mark Homer, a digital legal marketing leader, and the head of GNGF (Get Noticed Get Found), about what he was seeing in legal blogs only reinforced my thinking.
“The more we looked at the blogs most law firms had, and even some of the ones we were creating, we realized that many blogs on law firm websites were taking away from the client experience, not enhancing it.
On top this “aha” moment, I have been forced to read so much—let’s be blunt—crappy content over the years when providing web presence consultations and audits I felt there had to be a better way.”
[Note: Homer went on to find other ways to realize SEO more in line with the brand of firms with whom he was working.]
Either lawyers didn’t know lame when they saw it on their website, or they didn’t even know they had a blog to look at.
When Homer found lawyers who thought they had a blog, it was a stretch to say they knew they had a real law blog.
“When I asked the attorney about the blog content, most all said it was there because the lawyer was told he needed to buy a package of content each month for SEO reasons.
Many of the lawyers were not even required to approve the content, it just showed up on the blog each month. That’s just crazy and ethically dangerous. None of the companies selling these packages ever tell the lawyer that they should be the ones writing the blog content, either.”
Okay, at best in the case of crappy blogs, “I know I have something on my website because I was told I needed to buy a “package of content” to get some SEO.”
Lawyers who have a “blog,” but don’t even know it. Sad when you realize law blogs came about as way to connect lawyers with people – in a good way – and as a way for lawyers to help people based on the lawyer’s care, passion and expertise.